Nominator information

Dr. Anna Joo Kim

Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning Georgia Institute of Technology anna.kim@gatech.edu
“Clarkston Speaks! Planning with Refugee Communities in the South”
Study Site: Clarkston, Georgia
Graduate Studio Team Members:
Students: Ashley Bozarth, Anindya Debnath, Richard Duckworth, Emily Estes, Ryan Fleming, Nene Igietseme, Margaret Kent, Kevin Mara, Phoebe Mayor, Grant Patterson, Timothy Shelton, Deepti Silwal, Currie Cole Smith

Faculty Lead / PI:

Dr. Anna Joo Kim

As a Welcoming City, Clarkston (pop: 8000) has made many strides towards bringing together diverse groups of immigrants – and has welcomed more refugees than most places in Georgia; and yet immigrant civic engagement and participation at the city and county level remains on on-going challenge for many cities. More than 75% of the Georgia’s total foreign born population are drawn to suburbs within the metro area, places like Clarkston, Norcross, Duluth, and Lilburn. It is suburban places, nationwide, that experience the most immigrant-driven growth and population change (Brookings, 2014), and reflect the ongoing national preference for suburban areas in general. Singer’s work at the Brookings Institute (2015) has revealed the Atlanta MSA’s national classification as a “major-emerging” immigrant gateway –with one of the fastest immigrant growth rates in the United States. Clarkston’s particular set of challenges around refugee and immigrant integration are both like, and unlike, those of other welcoming cities in the Atlanta area. There are other cities with a 50%+ foreign-born population (Kim, 2016) but unlike other cities located in relatively affluent Gwinnett County, Clarkston’s majority foreign-born population is made up of African and Southeast Asian refugees – groups whose migration patterns (and social network resources) differ significantly from Latin American and East Asian immigrants.

As instructor of the Clarkston studio, I received a contract from the City of Clarkston to guide a unique city-wide study of Clarkston with a team of 13 graduate city planning students who specialize in land-use planning, transportation, environmental planning, economic and community development. For this study of immigrant and refugee integration in Clarkston, we were able to conduct 80 interviews with recently resettled refugees from more than 10 countries, 60 with elementary and middle school aged children, as well as interviews with political and business leaders in the Atlanta metro area, as well as analysis of more than 630 surveys with Clarkston residents across all racial groups and varying citizenship statuses. In our study, we explore the changes and adaptations that local cities with lower resource capacity (“infrastructure” cities) have gone through as they adapt to rapid demographic change, and in particular, implications for small towns adapting to to immigrant and refugee settlement. We worked closely with a local mosque, state wide refugee resettlement agencies, immigrant serving non-profit organizations, and the City Mayor and City Council to make our recommendations for improvements to communication and services within the city.

This project is innovative, and stands out among similar contracted projects conducting applied planning research with students in our field. In part, its innovativeness is due the “innovativeness” of the City of Clarkston itself: it is one of the most foreign-born cities (54%) in the United States, greatly exceeding the foreign-born percentage share of city populations in traditional destinations like Los Angeles or New York. On the other hand, the demographics of Clarkston look very much like new immigrant destinations and emergent destinations in other parts of the United States, particularly in non-traditional immigrant destination states like Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Louisiana. And in many of those states, newly arrived immigrants are actually refugees – largely arriving in smaller towns, and resettled through a combination of federal and state funding, with initial settlement being determined by refugee resettlement agencies. As such, the rate of demographic change (flipping from majority non-foreign born to majority foreign-born) in cities like Clarkston has been rapid (over a period of less than 10 years) and many cities have struggled to adapt to new American needs.

Over a period of 16 weeks, graduate students in the studio led an intensive, community-based, inclusive outreach efforts with immigrant, refugee, and native-born leaders in the Clarkston area. We partnered with NGOs like New American Pathways, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Somali American Community Center, the Bhutanese Community Association, the Eritrean American Association, the Clarkston Mosque, and many other groups with strong community ties and investment in the area. Many immigrants and refugees often shy away from public meetings, and may have lower participation rates in traditional civic engagement efforts, and even in publicly accessible surveys. To help overcome non-response bias among groups with language barriers and lower levels of participation in local government, the graduate students conducted focus groups in elementary schools, middle schools, immigrant leaders’ homes, vocational counseling programs, ESL classes; survey outreach (N=630) included street-level sampling in public places and public events, but also included in-language targeted outreach through ethnic community based organizations. The combination of these multiple efforts to more vulnerable or linguistically isolated populations has resulted in a very inclusive, and representative, sample of data from Clarkston residents, delivered to the City of Clarkston.

Attached are letters of support from partners Mayor of Clarkston, Ted Terry; Anika Polson of Georgia refugee resettlement agency, New American Pathways; and Daniel Valdez, Regional Director of the Welcoming America initiative. I also consider one of our greatest measures of impact, particularly in terms of its reach to the 50% of the town’s population who do not access information through the traditional public meeting, the August launch of the local “Clarkston Speaks” radio program, named after our studio. Offered through ethnic broadcasting channel, Sagal Radio Services, the station has a listening audience that spans the Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Burmese refugee community. I believe this is one of the best examples of student engagement in planning for a diverse community (utilizing an equally diverse set of methods) that I have ever seen in the course of my studio teaching at the Georgia Institute of Technology.